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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 6143353" data-attributes="member: 2303">Here you vocalize the monotheistic "god is above all" tradition. Which is fine, but not the only way to look at these things. The opposite view is of course that gods are not special at all - they are just at the top of the power pyramid. Most fantasy settings and traditional DnD fall somewhere in between. I'll try to describe this in descending order of omnipotence.The classic polytheistic gods of Earth - Egyptian, Irish, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Norse - were more powerful than any human, but could be fooled by humans and could certainly be opposed by other supernatural beings. And certain human heroes could and did challenge the gods directly. Indian gods seem to occupy a middle ground here; sometimes they are described as mere superbeings, at other times as more transcended "eternal" things and thus beyond conflict. The same development occurs in late Greek belief - the god Plato talks about is more like the Christian god than like Zeus.Pathfinder seems to have an all-powerful view of their gods - I've never seen any hints about gods having hit points or being defeatable in Pathfinder. They can fade into obscurity, but even then they still exist and can gain followers again. There is an example of a defeated god, who has had his head and body sundered from each other by a mortal, but each part is still immortal and divine and the quest is about rejoining them or not.In traditional DnD (0E, 1E, 2E, 3E, 4E), gods are certainly powerful, but they do have hit points and can thus be defeated. Each of these editions gave stats and hit points to gods. Potentially, a god could have a cleric more powerful than himself. Actually making the gods accessible in play was always optional, but the limit on divine power is made clear in spells like Commune. In the 4E Dungeon adventure path, one god (potentially a sponsor for a PC divine character) is slain by NPCs and the PCs are expected to slay another god in the finale.In BCMI the flatly stated goal of player characters was to become "gods" themselves - that is what I stands for - Immortal. There were even a few scenarios published for what to do once you did become an immortal.Buddhism acknowledges gods as superbeings, but with no more karmic insight than mortals. They are not capable of getting to nirvana, and humans who do transcend them in insight. Buddhism accepts the existence of gods, but sees them as largely irrelevant.The gods of fantasy classics like Elric and the Cthulhu Mythos are more super-monsters than gods, really. The Old Ones fought Cthulhu and his kin to a standstill, banishing them to R'lyeth. Elric personally slays a big part of the chaos pantheon.In shamanistic and far eastern traditions (Taoism, Mikoism) gods are really just the most powerful spirits. They do have supernatural powers and a connection to natural forces that is eternal, but as individuals they are not and they can often be tricked or even outfought. They also vary vastly in power, from a simple spirit of a single spring to mighty spirits of the sun or war. In this world-view, spirits are what DnD calls monsters, with "gods" being the most powerful of them.</blockquote>

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